Skip to main content

RANDOM THOUGHTS #9 - FELONIOUS PARENTING, RACHEL DOLEZAL, OBAMACARE

FELONIOUS PARENTING
I recently read a news story that left me dumbfounded. It seems that an 11-year-old Florida boy came home to a locked house, didn't have a key, and so he spent an hour and a half shooting hoops in the back yard while he waited for his folks. No big deal, right?

Wrong.

A neighbor called police. When the parents arrived, having been delayed on their return from work by traffic, they were arrested for felony neglect. Cuffed and strip searched. As I understand it, the boy and his younger brother (who was in proper day care) were removed from the home in favor of a relative who quickly asked the state to take over their care. The two boys would have ended up in foster care had the eldest not asked to see the judge and begged to be sent back home. The boys were then only allowed back with their parents under strict guidelines.

My parents were felons. I never knew.

There were even aggravating circumstances in my case. My parents let me drink water straight from the garden hose. For years, I walked a quarter-mile by myself to my school bus stop. And after school, if I wanted to go into town to visit friends, I had to walk a mile, part way along a state highway. In fact, the only rules that I can remember regarding after-school and summer playtime was that I "be safe" and make it home in time for dinner. Often, my parents didn't know where I was and who I was with.

My parents were felons. I never knew.

RACHEL DOLEZAL
Makes me crazy. She's black if she says that she is? Really, Whoopi? Really?

I'm sorry, but facts is facts. Snoop is black. Eminem is white. That doesn't say anything about their music or their audience. But two plus two equals four and not some number approximating four.

There may very well come a day when the preponderance of the population is so racially diverse that it would be well nigh impossible to assign such rigid categories as we do today. Indeed, having worked in an agency that collected demographics on thousands of heads of households over many years, I can attest to the fact that the category 'Mixed Race' has grown from a side note to nearly a plurality. But until we are all the color of coffee (light with two sugars, please), there's reality and there's fantasy. Let's not elevate someone whose reality is as confused as Dolezal's to the level of a game changer.

OBAMACARE
I expect that I will be writing more about healthcare after the Supreme Court publishes its decision on the legality of subsidizing the federal exchanges. But there's one thing that's been simmering among some folks that I know that needs to be addressed - the cost of insurance under Obamacare. Many of my friends oppose Obamacare based on those increased costs. I have three quick comments.

First, prior to Obamacare, healthcare costs in the US were increasing at double-digit percentage rates year after year. Healthcare inflation was a primary driver in increases in the cost of living. How quickly we forget.

Secondly, increases in cost to folks already insured was inevitable given the increased numbers of newly insured, particularly since people with pre-existing conditions could no longer be denied coverage. There were simply not enough young, healthy, and uninsured new signups to keep rates low.

Finally, if you want to address the cost of health insurance, it's time that we addressed the cost of healthcare. Why do we spend twice as much per capita on healthcare in the US than they do in just about every other modern industrialized economy? And having done so, why are our outcomes so far down the list? For a country that is supposed to be a meritocracy, why do we tolerate higher infant mortality rates, higher child mortality rates, and lower life expectancies than our European cousins?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

RESTAURANT TEN, UZES: RESTAURANT REVIEW

Ten sits just off the market square in Uzes, one of the prettiest villages in southern France. The newly renovated space is airy and comfortable with tables of sufficient size and sufficiently spaced to provide for a pleasant dining experience. Service was cheerful, fully bilingual, and attentive without being overbearing. The food presented well to both eye and tongue. And the rate of approximately 30 € per person for a party of five included starters, mains, a dessert or two, two bottles of local wine, and coffees at the finish. Reasonable if not cheap eats.  So why am I hesitant to give an unqualified thumbs up?  It took me a while to figure it out. Uzes is a quintessentially French village in a quintessentially French region of southern France. There are those who will say that the Languedoc is just as beautiful but less crowded and less expensive than its eastern neighbors. I know. I'm one of those people. But the fact remains that for many people, villages like Uzes are t

Kreuz Market vs. Smitty’s Market: Texas Barbecue in Lockhart

I was born and raised in New Jersey. I didn’t taste Texas barbecue until I was twenty-two years old. What the hell do I know about barbecue? And what could I add to the millions of words that have been written on the subject? Well, I know a bit about food. I’ve managed to check out a few of the finer joints in Texas – Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse in Dallas, Joe Cotton’s in Robstown before the fire, the dear departed Williams Smokehouse in Houston, and the incomparable New Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Huntsville . So I can speak from a reasonably wide experience. This will not be a comprehensive discussion of the relative merits of Texas barbecue as opposed to the fare available in places like Memphis or the Carolinas. It’s simply a take on our recent visits to Lockhart and the relative merits of Smitty’s versus Kreuz from our point of view. I’ll get all over academic in a later post. On our way out to the ranch in Crystal City, we stopped at Smitty’s. You have to look

CHÉ OLIVE / LE ZINC, CREISSAN: RESTAURANT REVIEW

No, it's not Chez Olive. It is indeed Ché complete with red star and black beret. I have no idea why and I wasn't about to ask. The French are the French and not to be analyzed too closely when it comes to politics, especially these days. Creissan is the next town over from our village of Quarante. We pass through it often and Ché Olive is right there on the main road at the entrance to town. (One of the signs still says Le Zinc. Olive says he prefers Ché Olive though.) Olive opened it a couple of years ago after leaving the Bar 40, Quarante's basic local watering hole that's undergone a bit of a renaissance lately. We hadn't heard much about Ché Olive from our usual sources for dining recommendations. So we just kept passing by. For reasons not central to this review, we decided to stop in for lunch on a mid-week in late December. The bar is cozy, the restaurant open and bright and modern. Newly renovated and perhaps a bit sterile. We were the f